T ̄antric KuÓnÓdalin ̄ı and Mantra Yogas. P ̄urna Yoga offers a spiritual path
relevant in the present circumstances of global crisis, and seeks to inte-
grate the quest for individual liberation with humankind’s evolutionary
destiny.^19
A MATRIX OF CLASSICAL YOGA
AS A RELIGIOUS THERAPEUTICMetaphysical and Epistemic Foundations
Yoga’s Therapeutic Paradigm
While Yoga is among humanity’s greatest religious resources for inform-
ing theory and practice in the domain of health, it is a very different rela-
tion between health and spirituality that grounds Yoga’s higher dimen-
sion as a religious therapeutic:
Yoga physiology or psychology thus takes its direction and significance
from the reality which is beyond the body or the psyche. This renders
the physio-psychology of yoga sacred. The cultivation of the body or
the mind for their own sake is not yoga. The psychic healing of yoga
has its centre above the psyche; here the wholeness aspired for is that of
holiness.^20Yoga upholds a standard of human well being—psychophysical and spir-
itual—that greatly expands our view of body, health, and human poten-
tial. The wholeness that is holiness, the liberation that is healing in its
fundamental meaning, is the goal of Yogic religious therapeutics. Yoga’s
philosophical foundations have a therapeutic orientation whose concern
“is not only the diagnosis of the human condition but also the prescrip-
tion and effecting of a cure that will make man whole.”^21
Yoga’s Diagnosis of the Human Condition
Yoga’s metaphysics diagnoses the human condition as a state of suffering
due to ignorance whose specific form is misidentification of Self with ma-
teriality. By understanding the principles that govern nature and the
human being, a yogin can “diagnose and thus overcome his fundamental
metaphysical illness of ‘mis-identification with matter.’”^22 Misery, accord-
ing to the Yoga-sutras ̄ , can and should be prevented [YS 2.16]. The cause
of misery is “the conjunction (samyogaÓ ) of the Seer and the Seen” [YS
2.17]. ‘Seer’ or draÓsÓtÓr,[√dÓr ́s‘to see’] and ‘Seen’ designate the two forms
94 religious therapeutics